Food Incident Exercise Series

Steelhenge has been supporting the Food Standards Agency (FSA) with their exercise programme over a number of years. This has included running a small technical exercise to rehearse the organisation's activation arrangements as well as three major internal FSA command post exercises following the revision of the Agency's Incident Response Protocol.

The Food Standards Agency is an independent Government department set up by an Act of Parliament in 2000 to protect the public's health and consumer interests in relation to food. The FSA provides advice and information to the public and Government on food safety from farm to fork. It also protects consumers through effective food enforcement and monitoring.

The aim of the command post exercises is to rehearse the Agency's Incident Response Protocol in its entirety. This requires a full simulation of a high level food safety incident including rehearsing external communication channels, EU linkages, and communications with the wider public and industry. This is achieved through Steelhenge's ability to work effectively with stakeholders at a highly technical level to develop an appropriate and tailored scenario designed to achieve the specific aims and objectives of each exercise and its in-house media capability.

The exercises have enabled the Agency to fully rehearse their Incident Response Protocol, building confidence and capability within the response teams. Issues and developmental opportunities have been captured by a team of observers and fed into a post-exercise report along with player feedback and distilled into a set of recommendations to support continuous improvement.